The present invention relates generally to an apparatus and method for preparing dental retro-fillings, or drilling bores into the roots of teeth.
In root canal surgery, an opening is drilled into a tooth from the top, revealing the space containing the pulp. The pulp is then removed, and the entire internal area of the tooth is filled with a suitable rubber filler material. However, this is sometimes not sufficient to deal with the problem, and the patient continues to feel pain in the tooth. In this event, the dental surgeon must drill into the bottom of the tooth root in the jawbone to remove the bottom of the root, and removing the abcess. An opening must be cut in the side of the jawbone to gain access to the tooth root. The tip of the root is then removed. The next step in root canal surgery is a so-called retro-filling, in which a reverse cylindrical bore is cut into the bottom of the root, and filled wtih a filling material. The making of the necessary reverse cylindrical bore requires the cutting of a fairly large hole in the jawbone to gain access to the tooth, under current procedures.
Existing tools used by dentists to drill bores in the roots of teeth for retro-filling comprise a handpiece having an end portion from which a short, rotary drill bit projects perpendicularly. The size of the handpiece makes it difficult to gain access to the root without cutting a large opening in the jawbone, and it is also difficult to ensure that the bore extends parallel to the central longitudinal axis of the root using the existing tool, since the drill bit has a tendency to wobble and can even destroy the root completely in some cases.